The core story concerns a man’s quest to explore the supernatural interior of a house in Virginia. Will Navidson initially intends to make a documentary about his family adjusting to a new home. He plants motion-sensitive video cameras in the rooms and starts filming happy family scenes, but the house quickly begins to tell another story altogether. As in the case of Stephen King’s The Shining (1980), the house has a sinister personality of its own. It can create inner spaces that defy the laws of physics. This phenomenon, known as “little/big” in fantasy fiction circles, begins innocuously enough with a closet that has about one quarter-inch of space inside of it that is physically impossible according to any measurement outside the house. Intrigued, Navidson brings in some specialists to try to figure out where his calculations could have gone wrong, but he then discovers in the closet a freezing, absolutely pitch-dark corridor that leads to a maze of empty rooms and larger corridors and eventually a gigantic spiral staircase that seems to drop down to the center of the earth. Insofar as the closet faces the outside wall of the house, none of this interior should exist, and when he and other men explore it, the dimensions of the place tend to shift mysteriously, leading the men into a tomblike expanse that proves dangerous. The Navidson Record recounts the various exhibitions into this space and the adventures the men encounter
In his discussion of The Navidson Record, Zampanò brings in mock scholarship from commentators that range from Jacques Derrida to guests on the Today show. By inventing authoritative voices reacting to the documentary, the novel ironically cultivates its myth of global importance. Early on, Zampanò writes, by way of introduction: These days, with the unlikely prospect of any sort of post-release resolution or revelation, Navidson’s film seems destined to achieve at most cult status.
Danielewski not only defines the response to his work in advance but also helps bring about the cult following his novel has since received. He is masterful at mimicking the critical feeding frenzy of a culture eager to dissect any story in terms of its psychological or ideological implications. In its way, Zampanò’s essay reads like the ultimate mock dissertation with its excessive footnotes and incongruous explications. He uses scholarship to help create suspense. Danielewski will have the novel veer off into a detailed psychological interpretation, the derivation of a word, or a list of photographers just when the story is getting exciting, putting off readers with words. When the exploring party starts to get lost in the maze, footnotes start to pile up and fold over each other, creating a parallel puzzle of words for readers. Obviously, Danielewski had fun lampooning the signature styles of such cultural figures as Camille Paglia, Derrida, and Hunter S. Thompson. He exposes a culture bloated on its own commentary, always ready to create schools of criticism out of the tiniest mystery.
The visual pyrotechnics on the page remain the most inventive aspect of the novel. In the manner of the shaped poems of George Herbert, Danielewski creates patterns out of the margins and the font, turning the print upside down, using the white space of a page to accentuate a small procession of words depicting by their arrangement the situation in the story, sometimes leaving the page altogether blank. Every time the word “house” appears, it is printed in blue, perhaps to show its otherworldly dimension. In the exhibits chapters late in the book, there are also cartoon versions of key scenes, photographs of collages of small items that radiate significance, and drawings on the backs of envelopes, all of these adding images to words for readers to interpret. At times, his devices can seem too obvious and contrived (steps in a ladder do not have to appear as steps of print on the page), but the novel tries to find a mean between the visual sophistication of its young media-savvy reader and the printed page.
The weaknesses of the novel relate to its ambition. Sometimes, the gothic language strains for effect, undermining the horror Danielewski tries to convey. The scenes with sex and violence seem heightened for readers jaded by horror film watching. For instance, late in the novel, Truant keeps a diary as he travels around the United States as an obsessed vagabond tormented by his vision of Zampanò’s manuscript and by other demons. In his diary entries, he imagines raping and killing people, and the prose becomes too arch to merit plausibility. If he is so close to the edge of paranoid terror, why would he keep writing it down? The form strains against the content. For much of the novel, Danielewski finds a nice balance between the formalism of the Zampanò style and Truant’s more “slacker” Generation X-style sensibility, but he sometimes telegraphs emotions too much. The several references to Edgar Allan Poe show that the influence of his sometimes overwrought gothic style on both Zampanò and Truant can have its disadvantages. Truant, for instance, tells of how Zampanò’s voice echoes “in the chambers of my heart, sounding those eternal tones of grief, though no longer playing the pipes in my head.” Such grand sweeps of emotion sound odd coming from a man who specializes in preparing needles in a tattoo parlor.
In the tradition of The Blair Witch Project, House of Leaves never unravels many of its mysteries. Readers never learn what monster makes a growl in the dark inner chambers of the house or claw marks in the floor of Zampanò’s apartment. Danielewski hints that the house is part of a long tradition of horror stretching from the earliest Virginia settlers of Jamestown back to Dante’s tour of hell and the ancient Greek myths, but his clues are open-ended, leading to more questions and more critical conundrums. Scientific study of the wall samples provides a bewildering range of rock sources, some of which stretch far back in geological time. Studies of the effects of echoes both intrigue and mystify. Often, explorers get hurt and/or die in the maze at the hands of one another as much as from exposure. The cold, darkness, and general lack of sensory stimulation bring out the weaknesses in their characters in odd ways. One Hemingwayesque macho explorer named Holloway Roberts goes berserk and starts shooting his fellow explorers in his delusional need to find a tangible enemy. In a similar way, the novel frustrates the reader’s parallel search for explanations behind the house.
Danielewski often leaves it up to the female characters to save men from self-destruction. Will Navidson’s wife, Karen Green, has to choose between supporting her husband’s efforts and cutting him off from his family for foolishly risking death. Ultimately, her choice to return to the house saves her husband from his fifth and final solitary exhibition into the inner chamber, and it seems, in a slightly sentimental way, that her love saves his life. When she finds him nearly dead from exposure to the cold, she holds him in her arms and the gothic interior fades away, leaving them miraculously on the lawn, in a manner reminiscent of Alice’s escape from Wonderland.
Another female character, Johnny Truant’s mother, Pelafina Heather Lievre, unexpectedly comes to dominate the end of the novel when a bunch of her letters in an appendix provides an epistolary drama that refracts back over all of Truant’s footnotes. Truant’s mother emotionally supports her son during his rootless youth much as Karen helps Navidson. Her letters seem innocuous and sad enough, since she remains institutionalized as he moves from foster family to private school, but then she resorts to a code in which readers use the first letter of each word to form new words. Once readers decode her letter, they find to their surprise and dread that she has been repeatedly raped by some unknown figure in the mental asylum and that she has to resort to subterfuge in order to send the letter. Suddenly, her correspondence takes on a chilling new interpretation that changes the outlook of the entire novel. Readers realize that Truant might have been suffering under this knowledge of his mother all along, and are tempted to go back and reread for further signs of his mother’s influence on the whole narrative.
Brilliant in its use of page layout and story construction, House of Leaves ingeniously blends multiple discourses, allowing readers to synthesize a storyline out of scraps of academic and popular culture. While open to the charge of excessive postmodern game-playing, Danielewski grounds his narrative with the voices of three strong characters, Zampanò, Truant, and Truant’s mother, Pelafina. House of Leaves attests to the curious resilience of the novel form over all the competing electronic sources of entertainment. Even though he imitates many types of media—the screenplay, the documentary, the diary, the film review, the collage, the poem, the cartoon, the letter—Danielewski shows how the novel can encompass them all in a detective-like search for what Zampanò calls “the most difficult subject of all: the sight of darkness itself.”